Project description
Redesigning Europe's cities to improve quality of space
Redesigning European cities is fundamental to urban development. Urban MAESTRO looks at the ways that these cities are being designed and financed, focusing on innovative ways of generating and implementing urban spatial quality. Such modalities of urban governance, including multi-stakeholder design platforms and quality negotiation mechanisms, help act as key enablers or brokers in the process. Urban MAESTRO opts to explore these issues in depth. It will help strengthen the global understanding of innovative urban design governance. It will also contribute to realising the EU's New Urban Agenda by 2030.
Objective
The proposed action: URBAN DESIGN GOVERNANCE, to be known as Urban Maestro, looks at the ways European cities are being designed and financed, focusing on innovative ways of generating and implementing urban spatial quality: the “soft power” modalities of urban design governance. Soft power modalities refer to those approaches where public authorities act in an informal capacity as enablers or brokers rather than through formal regulatory or direct investment powers. Examples include multi-stakeholder design platforms, bouwmeesters, city-architects, quality negotiation mechanisms and the like. The action will focus on these processes and how they are being used to shape cities through means short of regulation, direct design or development.
To explore these issues the work programme will seek to map out the design governance landscape in jurisdictions across Europe (hard and soft / formal and informal); burrow down into their workings via a series of pan-European workshops; contrast experiences in Europe to international practices elsewhere; use the initiative to build a long-term network for sharing best practice; and support policy uptake focussed on the drive to urban quality across the continent, and globally.
Urban Maestro will strengthen the global understanding of innovative urban design governance. It will contribute to accelerate the realization of the New Urban Agenda and the 2030 Agenda in the EU, and reinforce the global urban debate on qualitative aspects of urban development.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
CSA - Coordination and support actionCoordinator
00100 Nairobi
Kenya